open.substack.com/pub/illstarr...
28.08.2025 12:33
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From September 19, I will be posting a chapter every two weeks, on the same day of the week that the story takes place. There are six instalments. The final one will appear at the end of autumn. The first chapter will be open to everyone, the rest will only be available to paying subscribers.
Thursday is the story of a community. Every weeknight, the families gather. They repeat the sounds of an ancient language, preserving it from oblivion. But there is a history the community has forgotten. And there is something or someone in the forest outside, waiting to come back in.
In 2024 I wrote a story about what could come after a time of death. It is my way of thinking through these times. In my mind it is very much about both the Palestinian genocide and the destruction of the living world, but it does not reference these things directly. It is a kind of parable.
From September 19 you can read my novella Thursday on Substack. Description below.
The old techniques of alienation don’t work anymore. The reader is pre-alienated, already suspicion of the humanity behind written text. The new machine poetry plays with that suspicion, and encourages us to be suspicious of the robotic tendencies in ourselves and our favourite human writers.
The problem is that there is nothing random about LLMs. They are not surprising, and have gone to great pains to not be uncouth. The response to them in the first generation of AI poetry reflects this break with the machine poetry of the past.
Poets who embraced machines, from Tzara to flarf, did so because of the surprising, ludicrous results they yielded ran contrary to the expectations that readers had of poetry. Chance combination can open up possibilities that a mind can’t see.
Long before there was internet, there have been language generation machines, and poets have loved fiddling with them.
But where in visual art there is a fair bit of exploration of the possibility of a serious art made with AI, I haven’t seen a lot to that extent in literature (there are exceptions, of course). But there is a ready-made tradition for it.
The response of the book industry to AI has been mostly defensive, emphasising the uniqueness of human writers and translators. It’s a game of real vs fake, original vs knockoff. I get it, it’s their copyright being infringed upon.
They mimic emotion and consciousness astonishingly well. According to ChatGPT-5, its system is ‘weighted toward choosing certain patterns of words that align with being polite, clear and empathetic.’ And this makes LLMs bad, bad writers.
AI generated literature is drivel, because the text LLMs produce are meant to be the opposite of literature: smooth, reassuring and inoffensive. And, ultimately, deceitful, because models like ChatGPT are made to conceal what they actually are: not a human voice, but a fancy text predictor.
🧵I might be worried about my income, but not about the future of literature. Machines and writing have a more harmonious past than you might think.
illstarredletter.substack.com/p/are-we-doo...
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An often overlooked way for literature to be political is to be of use to a revolutionary actor. Not primarily to instruct or to propagate, but to furnish the difficult work of politics with imagination. read more: illstarredletter.substack.com/p/an-ill-sta...
Hey everyone, I started a newsletter about literature and the left: the ill-starred letter. illstarredletter.substack.com?r=49bt0&utm_...
